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John Dewey (October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer whose thoughts and ideas have been highly influential in the United States and around the world. Dewey, along with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, is recognized as one of the founders of the philosophical school of pragmatism. He is also one of the founders of functional psychology and was a leading representative of the progressive movement in U.S.
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Quotations
A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.
Democracy and Education An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (1916) The Free Press
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination. -- The Quest for Certainty (1933)
Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril.
Men's fundamental attitudes toward the world are fixed by the scope and qualities of the activities in which they partake. p. 135
Results (external answers and solutions) may be hurried; but processes may not be forced. They take their own time to mature. p. 176
Encyclopedia
John Dewey (October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer whose thoughts and ideas have been highly influential in the United States and around the world. Dewey, along with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, is recognized as one of the founders of the philosophical school of pragmatism. He is also one of the founders of functional psychology and was a leading representative of the progressive movement in U.S. schooling during the first half of the 20th century.
Although Dewey is best known for his works on education, he also wrote on a wide range of subjects, including experience and nature, art and experience, logic and inquiry, democracy, and ethics.
In his advocacy of democracy, Dewey considered two fundamental elements—schools and civil society—as being key areas needing attention and reconstruction to encourage experimental intelligence and plurality. In the necessary reconstruction of civil society, Dewey asserted that full democracy was to be obtained not just by extending voting rights but also by ensuring there exists a fully-formed public opinion, accomplished by effective communication among citizens, experts, and politicians, with the latter being held accountable for the policies they adopt.
Life and works
Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont of modest family origins. Like his older brother, Davis Rich Dewey, he attended the University of Vermont, from which he graduated (Phi Beta Kappa) in 1879. After three years as a high school teacher in Oil City, Pennsylvania, Dewey decided that he was unsuited for employment in primary or secondary education. After studying one year under G. Stanley Hall, working in the first American laboratory of psychology, Dewey received his Ph.D. from the School of Arts & Sciences at Johns Hopkins University in 1884, he took a faculty position at the University of Michigan (1884-1888 and 1889-1894) with the help of George Sylvester Morris. His unpublished and now lost dissertation was titled "The Psychology of Kant" and he made a special study of Hegel's Absolute idealism.
In 1894 Dewey joined the newly founded University of Chicago (1894-1904) where he shaped his belief in an empirically based theory of knowledge aligning his ideals with the newly emerging Pragmatic school of thought. His time at the University of Chicago resulted in four essays collectively entitled Thought and its Subject-Matter which was published with collected works from his colleagues at Chicago under the collective title Studies in Logical Theory (1903). During this time Dewey also founded the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools where he was able to actualize his pedagogical beliefs which provided material for his first major work on education, The School and Society (1899). Disagreements with the administration ultimately led to his resignation from the University at which point he left for the East Coast. In 1899, John Dewey was elected president of the American Psychological Association. From 1904 until his death he was professor of philosophy at both Columbia University and Teachers College, Columbia University. In 1905 he became president of the American Philosophical Association. He was a long-time member of the American Federation of Teachers.
Along with the historian Charles Beard, economists Thorstein Veblen and James Harvey Robinson, Dewey is one of the founders of The New School for Social Research. Dewey's most significant writings were "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology" (1896), a critique of a standard psychological concept and the basis of all his further work; Democracy and Education (1916), his celebrated work on progressive education; Human Nature and Conduct (1922), a study of the role of habit in human behavior; The Public and its Problems (1927), a defense of democracy written in response to Walter Lippmann's The Phantom Public (1925); Experience and Nature (1925), Dewey's most "metaphysical" statement; Art as Experience (1934), Dewey's major work on aesthetics; A Common Faith (1934), a humanistic study of religion, which was originally delivered as the Dwight H. Terry Lectureship at Yale; Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938), an examination of Dewey's unusual conception of logic; and Freedom and Culture (1939), a political work examining the roots of fascism. While each of these works focuses on one particular philosophical theme, Dewey wove all of his major themes into everything he wrote.
Dewey and functional psychology
At University of Michigan, Dewey published his first two books, Psychology (1887), and Leibniz's New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding (1888), both of which expressed Dewey's early commitment to Hegelian idealism. Psychology explored the synthesis between this idealism and experimental science that Dewey was then attempting to effect.
While still professor of philosophy at Michigan, Dewey and his junior colleagues, James Hayden Tufts and George Herbert Mead, together with his student James Rowland Angell, all strongly influenced by the recent publication of William James' landmark Principles of Psychology (1890), began to reformulate psychology, focusing more strongly on the social environment and on the activity of mind and behaviour than the physiological psychology of Wundt and his followers.
By 1894, Dewey had joined Tufts, with whom he would later write Ethics (1908), at the newly-founded University of Chicago and invited Mead and Angell to follow him, the four forming the core of the so-called "Chicago group" of psychology.
Their new approach to psychology, later dubbed functional psychology, had a more practical emphasis on action and application. In Dewey's article "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology" which appeared in Psychological Review in 1896, he reasons against the traditional stimulus-response understanding of the reflex arc in favor of a "circular" account in which what serves as "stimulus" and what as "response" depends on how one views the situation, and defends the unitary nature of the sensory motor circuit. While he does not deny the existence of stimulus, sensation, and response, he disagreed that they were separate, juxtaposed events happening like links in a chain. He put forward the idea that there is a coordination by which the stimulus is enriched by the results of previous experiences. The response is modulated thanks to sensorial experience. That is to say, the stimulus, sensation, and response are phases in a "division of labor" as part of an overall coordination of action as the human organism adapts to its environment.
Dewey, not without polemic, was elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1899.
In 1984, the American Psychological Association announced that Lillian Moller Gilbreth (1878-1982) had become the first psychologist to be commemorated on a United States postage stamp. However, psychologists Gary Brucato Jr. and John D. Hogan later made the case that this distinction actually belonged to John Dewey, who had been celebrated on an American stamp 17 years earlier. While some psychology historians consider Dewey more of a philosopher than a bona fide psychologist, the authors noted that Dewey was a founding member of the A.P.A., served as the A.P.A.'s eighth President in 1899, and was the author of an 1896 article on the reflex arc which is now considered a cornerstone of American functional psychology.
Dewey also expressed interest in work in the psychology of visual perception carried out by Dartmouth research professor Adelbert Ames, Jr..
Pragmatism and instrumentalism
Although Dewey did not identify himself as a pragmatist per se, but instead referred to his philosophy as "instrumentalism", he is considered one of the three central figures in American pragmatism, along with Charles Sanders Peirce, who coined the term, and William James, who popularized it. Dewey worked from strongly Hegelian influences, unlike James, whose lineage was primarily British, drawing particularly on empiricist and utilitarian thought. Neither was Dewey so pluralist or relativist as James. He held that value was a function not of whim nor purely of social construction, but a quality situated in events ("nature itself is wistful and pathetic, turbulent and passionate" (Experience and Nature)).
He also held that experimentation (social, cultural, technological, philosophical) could be used as a relatively hard-and-fast arbiter of truth. For example, James felt that for many people who lacked "over-belief" in religious concepts, human life was shallow and rather uninteresting, and that while no one religious belief could be demonstrated as the correct one, we are all responsible for taking the leap of faith and making a gamble on one or another theism, atheism, monism, etc. Dewey, in contrast, while honoring the important role that religious institutions and practices played in human life, rejected belief in any static ideal, such as a theistic God. Dewey felt that only scientific method could reliably further human good.
Of the idea of God, Dewey said, "it denotes the unity of all ideal ends arousing us to desire and actions."
As with the reemergence of progressive philosophy of education, Dewey's contributions to philosophy as such (he was, after all, much more a professional philosopher than a thinker on education) have also reemerged with the reassessment of pragmatism, beginning in the late 1970s, by thinkers like Richard Rorty, Richard J. Bernstein and Hans Joas.
Because of his process-oriented and sociologically conscious view of the world and knowledge, he is sometimes seen as a useful alternative to both modern and postmodern ways of thinking. Dewey's non-foundational approach pre-dates postmodernism by more than half a century. Recent exponents (like Rorty) have not always remained faithful to Dewey's original vision, though this itself is completely in keeping both with Dewey's own usage of other thinkers and with his own philosophy— for Dewey, past doctrines always require reconstruction in order to remain useful for the present time.
Dewey's philosophy has gone by many names other than "pragmatism". He has been called an instrumentalist, an experimentalist, an empiricist, a functionalist, and a naturalist. The term "transactional" may better describe his views, a term emphasized by Dewey in his later years to describe his theories of knowledge and experience.
Epistemology
The terminology problem in the fields of epistemology and logic is partially due, according to Dewey and Bentley, to inefficient and imprecise use of words and concepts that reflect three historic levels of organization and presentation. In the order of chronological appearance, these are:
- Self-Action: Prescientific concepts regarded humans, animals, and things as possessing powers of their own which initiated or caused their actions.
- Interaction: as described by Newton, where things, living and inorganic, are balanced against something in a system of interaction, for example, the third law of motion states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
- Transaction: where modern systems of descriptions and naming are employed to deal with multiple aspects and phases of action without any attribution to ultimate, final, or independent entities, essences, or realities.
A series of characterizations of Transactions indicate the wide range of considerations involved.
Logic and method
Dewey sees paradox in contemporary logical theory. Proximate subject matter garners general agreement and advance, while the ultimate subject matter of logic generates unremitting controversy. In other words, he challenges confident logicians to answer the question of the truth of logical operators. Do they function merely as abstractions (e.g., pure mathematics) or do they connect in some essential way with their objects, and therefore alter or bring them to light? ("The Problem of Logical Subject Matter", in Logic: The Theory of Inquiry )
Logical positivism also figured in Dewey's thought. About the movement he wrote that it "eschews the use of 'propositions' and 'terms', substituting 'sentences' and 'words'." ("General Theory of Propositions", in Logic: The Theory of Inquiry) He welcomes this changing of referents “in as far as it fixes attention upon the symbolic structure and content of propositions.” However, he registers a small complaint against the use of “sentences” and “words” in that without careful interpretation the act or process of transposition “narrows unduly the scope of symbols and language, since it is not customary to treat gestures and diagrams (maps, blueprints, etc.) as words or sentences.” In other words, sentences and words, considered in isolation, do not disclose intent, which may be inferred or “adjudged only by means of context.” (Ibid.)
Yet Dewey was not entirely opposed to modern logical trends. Concerning traditional logic, he states: “Aristotelian logic, which still passes current nominally, is a logic based upon the idea that qualitative objects are existential in the fullest sense. To retain logical principles based on this conception along with the acceptance of theories of existence and knowledge based on an opposite conception is not, to say the least, conductive to clearness – a consideration that has a good deal to do with existing dualism between traditional and the newer relational logics.” (Qualitative Thought )
Louis Menand argues in The Metaphysical Club that Jane Addams had been critical of Dewey's emphasis on antagonism in the context of a discussion of the Pullman strike of 1894. In a later letter to his wife, Dewey confessed that Addams' argument was "the most magnificent exhibition of intellectual & moral faith I ever saw. She converted me internally, but not really, I fear.... When you think that Miss Addams does not think this as a philosophy, but believes it in all her senses & muscles--Great God... I guess I'll have to give it [all] up & start over again." He went on to add, "I can see that I have always been interpreting dialectic wrong end up, the unity as the reconciliation of opposites, instead of the opposites as the unity in its growth, and thus translated the physical tension into a moral thing... I don't know as I give the reality of this at all,... it seems so natural & commonplace now, but I never had anything take hold of me so."
In a letter to Addams herself, Dewey wrote, clearly influenced by his conversation with her: "Not only is actual antagonizing bad, but the assumption that there is or may be antagonism is bad-- in fact, the real first antagonism always comes back to the assumption."
Aesthetics
Art as Experience (1934) is Dewey's major writing on aesthetics. It is, according to his place in the Pragmatist tradition that emphasizes community, a study of the individual art object as embedded in (and inextricable from) the experiences of a local culture. Such an approach is, of course, open to postcolonial, postmodern and deconstructive critique, but has been found useful in a number of disciplines, including the new media. See his Experience and Nature for an extended discussion of 'Experience' in Dewey's philosophy.
On democracy
The overriding theme of Dewey's works was his profound belief in democracy, be it in politics, education or communication and journalism. As Dewey himself put it in 1888, while still at the University of Michigan, "Democracy and the one, ultimate, ethical ideal of humanity are to my mind synonymous."
With respect to technological developments in a democracy: "Persons do not become a society by living in physical proximity any more than a man ceases to be socially influenced by being so many feet or miles removed from others" -John Dewey from Andrew Feenberg's "Community in the Digital Age"
On education
Dewey's educational theories were presented in "My Pedagogic Creed" (1897), The School and Society (1900), The Child and Curriculum (1902), Democracy and Education (1916) and Experience and Education (1938).
His recurrent and intertwining themes of education, democracy and communication are effectively summed up in the following excerpt from the first chapter, "Education as a Necessity of Life", of his 1916 book, Democracy and Education: an introduction to the philosophy of education: "What nutrition and reproduction are to physiological life, education is to social life. This education consists primarily in transmission through communication. Communication is a process of sharing experience till it becomes a common possession."
As well as his very active and direct involvement in setting up educational institutions such as the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools (1896) and The New School for Social Research (1919), many of Dewey's ideas influenced the founding of Bennington College in Vermont, where he served on the Board of Trustees.
Dewey was a relentless campaigner for reform of education, pointing out that the authoritarian, strict, pre-ordained knowledge approach of modern traditional education was too concerned with delivering knowledge, and not enough with understanding students' actual experiences.
Dewey was the most famous proponent of hands-on learning or experiential education, which is related to, but not synonymous with experiential learning. Dewey went on to influence many other influential experiential models and advocates.
Many researchers credit him with the influence of Project Based Learning (PBL) which places students in the active role of researchers.
On journalism
Since the mid-1980s, Deweyan ideas have experienced revival as a major source of inspiration for the public journalism movement. Dewey's definition of "public," as described in The Public and its Problems, has profound implications for the significance of journalism in society. As suggested by the title of the book, his concern was of the transactional relationship between publics and problems. Also implicit in its name, public journalism seeks to orient communication away from elite, corporate hegemony toward a civic public sphere. "The 'public' of public journalists is Dewey's public."
Dewey gives a concrete definition to the formation of a public. Publics are spontaneous groups of citizens who share the indirect effects of a particular action. Anyone affected by the indirect consequences of a specific action will automatically share a common interest in controlling those consequences, i.e., solving a common problem.
Since every action generates unintended consequences, publics continuously emerge, overlap, and disintegrate.
In The Public and its Problems, Dewey presents a rebuttal to Walter Lippmann’s treatise on the role of journalism in democracy. Lippmann’s model was a basic transmission model in which journalists took information given them by experts and elites, repackaged that information in simple terms, and transmitted the information to the public, whose role was to react emotionally to the news. In his model, Lippmann supposed that the public was incapable of thought or action, and that all thought and action should be left to the experts and elites.
Dewey refutes this model by assuming that politics is the work and duty of each individual in the course of his daily routine. The knowledge needed to be involved in politics, in this model, was to be generated by the interaction of citizens, elites, experts, through the mediation and facilitation of journalism. In this model, not just the government is held accountable, but the citizens, experts, other actors as well.
Dewey also revisioned journalism to fit this model by taking the focus from actions or happenings and changing the structure to focus on choices, consequences, and conditions, in order to foster conversation and improve the generation of knowledge in the community. Journalism would not just produce a static product that told of what had already happened, but the news would be in a constant state of evolution as the community added value by generating knowledge. The audience would disappear, to be replaced by citizens and collaborators who would essentially be users, doing more with the news than simply reading it.
Dewey’s journalism was revolutionary because it changed the structure from choosing a winner of a given situation to posing alternatives and exploring consequences. His effort to change journalism, involve citizens, stimulation, was all under the auspices of creating the Great Community he wrote of in The Public and its Problems: “Till the Great Society is converted in to a Great Community, the Public will remain in eclipse. Communication can alone create a great community” (Dewey, pg. 144).
Dewey believed that communication creates a great community, and citizens who actively participate in public life contribute to that community. "The clear consciousness of a communal life, in all its implications, constitutes the idea of democracy." (The Public and its Problems, p. 149). This Great Community can only occur with "free and full intercommunication." (p. 211) Communication can be understood as journalism - the traditional forum in which people communicate.
On humanism
Dewey participated in a variety of humanist activities from the thirties into the fifties, which included sitting on the advisory board of Charles Francis Potter's First Humanist Society of New York (1929); being one of the original 34 signees of the first Humanist Manifesto (1933) and being elected an honorary member of the Humanist Press Association (1936).
His views on humanism are best summed in his own words from an article titled "What Humanism Means to Me", published in the June 1930 edition of Thinker 2:
"What Humanism means to me is an expansion, not a contraction, of human life, an expansion in which nature and the science of nature are made the willing servants of human good."
— John Dewey, "What Humanism Means to Me"
Social and political activism
As a major advocate for academic freedom, in 1935 Dewey, together with Albert Einstein and Alvin Johnson, became a member of the United States section of the International League for Academic Freedom, and in 1940, together with Horace M Kallen, edited a series of articles related to the infamous Bertrand Russell Case.
As well as being highly active in defending the independence of the teaching community, and opposing a communist take over of the New York Teacher's Union, Dewey was involved in the organization that eventually became the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
He headed the famous Dewey Commission held in Mexico in 1938, and which cleared Trotsky of the charges made against him by Stalin, and marched for women's rights, among many other causes.
In 1950, Dewey, together with Bertrand Russell, Benedetto Croce, Karl Jaspers, and Jacques Maritain agreed to act as honorary chairman of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.
Other interests
Dewey's interests and writings covered a wide range of subjects, and according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "a substantial part of his published output consisted of commentary on current domestic and international politics, and public statements on behalf of many causes. (He is probably the only philosopher in this Encyclopaedia to have published both on the Treaty of Versailles and on the value of displaying art in post offices.)"
In 1918, Dewey met F. M. Alexander in New York City and went on to write the introduction to Alexander's Constructive Conscious Control of the Inidividual (1923).
As well as his contacts with people mentioned elsewhere in the article, he also maintained correspondence with Henri Bergson, William M. Brown, Martin Buber, George S. Counts, William Rainey Harper, Sidney Hook, and George Santayana.
Criticism
In his lifetime Dewey was the target of notable critics, including Randolph Bourne, a former student of his, and Walter Lippmann, among others. Always at the forefront of the battle between the traditional and progressive education of his day, he is today often criticized for "what he did to our schools," a catch-all phrase which never actually pinpoints any specific criticism as it is not apparent that he really did anything directly to the schools, nor even that he fully approved of much of what passed for progressivism.
Likewise, on the one hand, Dewey is held up as the epitome of liberalism by many conservative pundits today (see The Closing of the American Mind), even being "portrayed as dangerously radical" during the era of McCarthyism, while on the other, quite a few on the left find him too conservative by today's post-modern standards. Meanwhile, Dewey was strongly critiqued by American communists because he took a stand against Stalinism and had philosophical differences with Marx.
Other criticisms levelled at him include his war stances in both the First and the Second World Wars, as well as, despite having been involved in the foundation of the NAACP, not having written more directly against racism.
Another, albeit minor, source of criticism has been religion. While one biographer, Steven C. Rockefeller, traced Dewey's firm democratic convictions to his childhood attendance at the Congregational Church, with its strong proclamation of social ideals, another, Edward A. White, a Stanford University professor of history, suggested in Science and Religion in American Thought (1952) that Dewey's work had led to the 20th century rift between religion and science. However, in reviewing the book in The Quarterly Review of Biology (1954), noted geneticist H. Bentley Glass openly wondered if the rift between religion and science would have taken much the same course, even if there had not been a John Dewey.
Academic awards
- Copernican Citation (1943)
- Doctor “honoris causa” – University of Oslo (1946)
- Doctor “honoris causa” – University of Pennsylvania (1946)
- Doctor “honoris causa” – Yale University (1951)
- Doctor “honoris causa” – University of Rome (1951)
Publications
Besides publishing prolifically himself, Dewey also sat on various boards of scientific publications such as Sociometry (advisory board, 1942) and Journal of Social Psychology (editorial board, 1942), as well as holding posts at other publications such as New Leader (contributing editor, 1949).
The following publications by John Dewey are referenced or mentioned in this article. A more complete list of his publications may be found at List of publications by John Dewey.
- "The New Psychology" Andover Review, 2, 278-289 (1884)
- Psychology (1887)
- Leibniz's New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding (1888)
- "The Ego as Cause" Philosophical Review, 3,337-341. (1894)
- (1896)
- "My Pedagogic Creed" (1897)
- The School and Society (1900)
- The Child and the Curriculum (1902)
- (1905)
- Moral Principles in Education (1909) The Riverside Press Cambridge
- How We Think (1910)
- Democracy and Education: an introduction to the philosophy of education (1916)
- Reconstruction in Philosophy (1919)
- Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology
- Experience and Nature (1925)
- The Public and its Problems (1927)
- The Quest for Certainty (1929)
- Individualism Old and New (1930)
- Philosophy and Civilization (1931)
- Ethics, second edition (with James Hayden Tufts) (1932)
- Art as Experience (1934)
- A Common Faith (1934)
- Liberalism and Social Action (1935)
- Experience and Education (1938)
- Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938)
- Freedom and Culture (1939)
- Knowing and the Known (1949) (with Arthur Bentley)
See also
- The Essential Dewey: Volumes 1 and 2. Edited by Larry Hickman and Thomas Alexander. (1998). Indiana University Press.
- The Philosophy of John Dewey. Edited by John J. McDermott. (1981). University of Chicago Press.
Dewey's Complete Writings is available in 3 multi-volume sets (37 volumes in all) from :
- The Early Works: 1892-1898 (5 volumes)
- The Middle Works: 1899-1924 (15 volumes)
- The Later Works: 1925-1953 (17 volumes)
The Correspondence of John Dewey is available on in 3 volumes.
Works about Dewey
- Alexander, Thomas. John Dewey's Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature (1987). SUNY Press.
- Boisvert, Raymond. John Dewey: Rethinking Our Time. (1997). SUNY Press.
- Campbell, James. . (1995) Open Court Publishing Company.
- Caspary, William R. . (2000). Cornell University Press.
- Hickman, Larry A. John Dewey's Pragmatic Technology. (1992) Indiana University Press.
- Hook, S. John Dewey: An Intellectual Portrait (1939)
- Kannegiesser, H. J. "Knowledge and Science" (1977) The Macmillan Company of Australia PTY Ltd
- Martin, Jay. The Education of John Dewey. (2003). Columbia University Press.* Rockefeller, Stephen. John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism. (1994). Columbia University Press
- Rogers, Melvin. The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy. (2008). Columbia University Press.
- Roth, Robert J. John Dewey and Self-Realization. (1962). Prentice Hall.
- Ryan, Alan. John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism. (1995). W.W. Norton.
- Seigfried, Charlene Haddock, (ed.). Feminist Interpretations of John Dewey (2001). Penn State University Press.
- Shook, John. Dewey's Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality. (2000)[. The Vanderbilt Library of American Philosophy
- Sleeper, R.W. The Necessity of Pragmatism: John Dewey's Conception of Philosophy. Introduction by Tom Burke. (2001) .University of Illinois Press.
- Westbrook, Robert B. John Dewey and American Democracy. (1991). Cornell University Press.
- White, Morton. The Origin of Dewey's Instrumentalism. (1943). Columbia University Press.
See also
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